<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0During my Junior High \/ Senior High years in Marquette, the frats and sororities at Northern Michigan University would have an annual spring bash called Greek Week.\u00a0 I can\u2019t say how long this went on or if it continues to this day, but I remember it mostly for the festival\u2019s finale that was held at Hedgecock Fieldhouse.\u00a0 It always had a carnival-like atmosphere and featured some great bands along with food, game booths, and other festive activities.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Included in this spring fling was a competition called the \u2018Mud Bowl\u2019 and I witnessed a couple before it was cancelled due to injuries and the general mayhem it created.\u00a0 The Mud Bowl involved plowing up a big circle of lawn in front of the Quad One dining hall, putting up a snow fence around it, and then flooding it for a couple of days to make the \u2018playing field\u2019.\u00a0 The Mud Bowl featured teams trying to navigate this muddy wallow while pushing an eight foot diameter \u2018Earthball\u2019 across the other team\u2019s goal line.\u00a0 At least one ambulance trip was made from the Mud Bowl every time it was held (I can verify this as it was held across the street from our house on Norway Avenue). \u00a0 The MB always ended in a free-for-all where bystanders were heaved into the muddy pit – sometimes willingly, sometimes not.\u00a0 One could avoid this fate if you kept your head on a swivel and could run faster than whoever got it into their head that you should be the next victim.\u00a0 I always avoided the mud bath, but enough innocent spectators and passersby got hauled into the action that this portion of Greek Week was eventually banned.\u00a0 I think the final straw was the poor young lady in the white spring dress who was dragged from the sidewalk on Lincoln Avenue (a good 500 yards away from the mud pit) and tossed in without any indication that she was a willing participant.\u00a0 Perhaps it was her screaming bloody murder that gave me this impression?\u00a0 Fortunately, the music part at Hedgecock did not get cancelled along with the Mud Bowl part of the Greek Week celebration.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Two of the more memorable GW concerts took place during my sophomore and senior years in high school.\u00a0 The first was opened by local band The French Church and included the MacDonald brothers (Warren and Gordon) on drums and bass, Mike Spratto on guitar, and Mike Cleary on vocals.\u00a0 I always made it a point to hang around stage side at these events because that usually gave me the best view of what the band was doing on stage.\u00a0 Naturally, I was interested in what the drummer was doing, but also how the band communicated with each other on stage.\u00a0 When TFC went up to do their set, Gordon grabbed my arm and said \u201chang around, when we are done we have to get our stuff off the stage quick so The McCoy\u2019s can go on.\u201d\u00a0 Hang around I did, literally.\u00a0 There were several people sitting on the first level of the three tiered PA tower next to the stage, so that is where I spent most of their set.\u00a0 Times were different back then so when the kid sitting to my right offered me his bottle in a brown paper bag, I took a swig.\u00a0 Whatever it was, it took my breath away and cleared my sinuses out in one gulp!\u00a0 I managed to get to the ground and back to my station at the back corner of the stage before the security folks herded everyone else off the PA riser and back to the floor at the front of the stage.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The French Church was playing on stage when I turned around and found myself face to face with The McCoy\u2019s guitarist (and singer, songwriter, leader) Rick Derringer.\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t quite fully grown at that point, but I was a head taller than Derringer (we were more (his) face to (my) chest). \u00a0 In my army shirt and jeans uniform (the standard 1960s cool look for musicians in training), I was extremely underdressed compared to him with his shag hair and stage clothes.\u00a0 \u201cWhat are you doing back here?\u201d he demanded.\u00a0 \u201cI’m humping equipment for The French Church,\u201d I replied above the din, nodding toward the stage.\u00a0 \u201cOh, okay,\u201d he said, \u201csee if you can clear some of these other people out of here [back stage] so nothing gets broken or stolen.\u201d\u00a0 Playing roady I could handle but no one was going to take me very seriously as a security guy.\u00a0 I kind of let that slide and went back to listening to The French Church finish their set.\u00a0 I never even got to set foot on stage because as soon as they started slinging amps and drums to the edge of the stage, I ended up doing all my hoisting and hauling from there.\u00a0 Mercifully, The McCoy\u2019s backline and drums were already on the stage so after this flurry of activity, I got to settle in and watch the headliners from the same spot.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0With all of TFC\u2019s stuff tucked up against the wall, The McCoy\u2019s got their drums moved forward and made sure everything was in working order.\u00a0 The Zerringer brothers (re-christened \u2018Derringer\u2019 in the McCoys) played drums and guitar in the band but I don\u2019t have names for the bass and keyboard players.\u00a0 They saved their biggest hit (<\/span>Hang on Sloopy<\/span><\/i>) for the encore.\u00a0 They weren\u2019t exactly playing dance music (this was billed as the Greek Week Festival Dance) but they did play a mix of heavy and experimental rock for the rest of their set.\u00a0 My knowledge base about the band began and ended with <\/span>Sloopy<\/span><\/i> so it was kind of interesting to hear them do stuff by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, for instance. \u00a0 Derringer had a little box on the stage rigged with draw bars like one would see on a Hammond organ and he was using them to make all kinds of strange sounds.\u00a0 At one point, he took off his guitar and was kneeling on the stage, essentially playing some form of out there electronic music with his little box being the only instrument he was manipulating while the rest of the band thundered on behind him.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0During that period of history, there was a lot of misinformation about hippies, young people with long hair, musicians, and such.\u00a0 Cliches categorized guys with long hair as some form of \u2018the great unwashed\u2019 generation.\u00a0 The keyboard player from The McCoys was my first encounter with someone who actually fit this description.\u00a0 I gave him some benefit of the doubt figuring they were on tour and living out of a van, so perhaps it was the stage clothing that needed some care.\u00a0 I also noticed that he was extremely \u2018agitated\u2019 with his eyes darting all over when engaged in conversation.\u00a0 He could stand still and seemed to be in a constant state of \u2018fidgeting\u2019 all at the same time.\u00a0 Being somewhat in awe of the whole \u2018this is a famous touring band\u2019 thing, I certainly wasn\u2019t going to ask any dumb questions.\u00a0 Someone else wandered backstage to talk to Derringer and came right out and asked, \u201cWhat\u2019s up with your keyboard player?\u201d\u00a0 Derringer was brutally honest and replied, \u201cSome of us are having a hard time regulating our intake and taking care of our personal needs.\u00a0 Some of us are going to be replaced as soon as we get home.\u00a0 He is a good keyboard player but this is getting old.\u201d\u00a0 In three sentences I got a whole lesson in \u2018how not to be when touring with a band\u2019.\u00a0 This was also my first glimpse that touring isn\u2019t just about playing music – it is also about business and like any business, touring musicians are also employees with rules of conduct they need to follow.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Since this encounter with Rick Derringer, I have enjoyed following his career as a sideman (with the late Johnny Winter\u2019s band (Johnny Winter And) and Johnny\u2019s brother in Edgar Winter\u2019s White Trash) as well as a songwriter, producer, solo artist and writer.\u00a0 Who knew at that time he would end up producing and paying for Weird Al\u2019s first album and end up being a featured player on a lot of hit records.\u00a0 He had a high enough profile in the biz to be included in Ringo Starr\u2019s All-Starr Band.\u00a0 Sadly, Derringer had health problems that sent him to the great gig in the sky in 2025.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Two years after The McCoys were featured at the Greek Week Festival, the Greek Council\u00a0 must have had a bigger entertainment budget to play with.\u00a0 While both of the headliners at this show were still relatively unknown, both had lower Michigan connections.\u00a0 One even had a Marquette history and both would go on to make it in the big time just down the road.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The first name I spied on the poster was Bob Seger whose claim to fame up to then was the hit song <\/span>Ramblin\u2019, Gamblin\u2019 Man<\/span><\/i> (released by the Bob Seger System).\u00a0 Imagine my surprise when a long haired, equally long bearded Seger opened the show solo.\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t expecting an acoustic Bob Seger and certainly not as the opener.\u00a0 The highlight of his set was his rendition of John Lennon\u2019s <\/span>Imagine.\u00a0 <\/span><\/i>Seger pulled out a folded sheet of paper and said, \u201cWe heard this on the radio coming up here on the interstate so I wrote down the words so I could play it for you.\u201d\u00a0 Having just been released, I hadn\u2019t even heard Lennon\u2019s version of <\/span>Imagine <\/span><\/i>yet, but to this day,\u00a0 when I hear the song, in my head it is Bob\u2019s version.\u00a0 Seger knew a good song when he heard it.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Act number two on the bill was a drum\/organ duo called Teegarden & Van Winkle.\u00a0 Drummer Dave Teegarden and organist Skip Knape had formed in Tulsa, Oklahoma but eventually made a musical home in Detroit.\u00a0 I knew nothing about them at the time but certainly enjoyed their music.\u00a0 Both sang and with Knape\/Van Winkle on keys and bass pedals, they produced a big sound.\u00a0 They had a #22 single on the American Hot 100 chart (<\/span>God, Love and Rock & Roll) <\/span><\/i>in 1970, so they had some name recognition with the crowd, but I was not familiar with them at all.\u00a0 After the second intermission, I got another surprise when Seger joined Teegarden & Van Winkle as a trio for the third set.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0With Seger now playing a Les Paul, the S,T & VW trio tore through some originals and a bunch of rock standards.\u00a0 Seger proved to be a good guitar player and I remember thinking, \u201cThis is a band I would like to hear record an LP.\u201d\u00a0 The collaboration eventually did put out a CD (<\/span>Smokin\u2019 OP\u2019s <\/span><\/i>which is short for <\/span>Smoking Other People\u2019s Songs<\/span><\/i>) which was not released until 2005.\u00a0 As the name implies, it features them playing cover tunes and it is a pretty good record (pun intended) of what they were doing live in 1971.\u00a0 Teegarden eventually played drums for Seger\u2019s Silver Bullet Band (recording four albums with that group) while Knape toured with his own band that included two female vocalists and horns.\u00a0 Teegarden & Van Winkle have gotten back together on a few occasions over the years.\u00a0 Seger?\u00a0 He ended up in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I don\u2019t remember much about the originals they played in 1971, but Seger\u2019s <\/span>Turn the Page<\/span><\/i> recounts getting hassled on the road for having long hair.\u00a0 Even though the lyrics place the event \u2018east of Omaha\u2019, he said the song came from an incident that happened on the road in Wisconsin while touring with T&VW. \u00a0 He eventually recorded it for his <\/span>Back in 1972 <\/span><\/i>album but it did not become wildly popular until it appeared on 1976\u2019s <\/span>Live Bullet<\/span><\/i> double album.\u00a0 Indeed, Seger wrote a lot of the music that would get him noticed while still on the road with T&VW.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The headliner on that night was none other than Brownsville Station.\u00a0 I am having a little bit of a problem remembering the specifics of this gig because I saw them twice over a span of a couple of years.\u00a0 I can place this show in 1971 because bassist Tony Driggins and drummer C.J. Cronly were in the band with both Cub Koda and Mike Lutz on guitars and vocals.\u00a0 Driggins departed in 1972 and Cronly was replaced by Henry \u2018H-Bomb\u2019 Weck about the same time.\u00a0 I must have seen them the second time before 1975 because Bruce Nazarian had not yet joined the band on second guitar.\u00a0 By the second time I saw them, Mike Lutz had switched to bass and they played as a three piece with Weck already on drums.\u00a0 A little detective work tells me that the Greek Week gig in 1971 was ahead of their 1973 release of <\/span>Smoking in the Boy\u2019s Room<\/span><\/i> and the second concert was after the release of <\/span>Smoking, <\/span><\/i>but before Nazarian started touring with them.\u00a0 If that seems a little convoluted to you, I will admit to looking at a lot of web pages and performing a bit of memory reconstruction to figure out the timeline here.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The official Brownsville Station site has a wonderful chronology of all their 1969 to 1979 concerts (and they played just about everywhere on bills with just about anyone who was big at that time), but sadly there are gaps.\u00a0 No doubt the list covers the big places they played during that time period.\u00a0 Back in those days, many\u00a0 bands filled off days with one-off gigs that were arranged as their tours moved along.\u00a0 Marquette was a great place to play, but it falls into that list of \u201cone-off, added to the tour later\u201d- places that don\u2019t always show up on the ledger.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I had gone to the first gig to see Seger with an added agenda: could this really be the same Michael Koda who had played in bands in the Marquette area when he was a student at NMU around 1968?\u00a0 Before he became \u2018Cub Koda\u2019, he was plain old Michael Koda and he instantly lit the Marquette music scene on fire.\u00a0 He went through a lot of musical combinations in a short period of time.\u00a0 Some said he was hard to work with, while others said he knew what he wanted his band to sound like and if you couldn\u2019t play up to that level, out you went.\u00a0 He played with the best equipment.\u00a0 When my band was scratching to buy one decent amp, Koda used a \u2018y\u2019 jack to plug his guitar into TWO Fender Twin Reverb amps at the same time.\u00a0 He wrote his own songs, he played harp, and he also played slide guitar with abandon.\u00a0 We really didn\u2019t quite know what to make of this dynamo of a guitar player from Manchester (Michigan, not England).\u00a0 The longest lasting backing group stayed together after Koda left for his rock \u2018n\u2019 roll PhD program in Las Vegas and they became the fabled Marquette area band Walrus.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Sure enough, Mike Koda was now Cub Koda.\u00a0 His tenure in Las Vegas certainly earned Cub his stripes (another intended pun as he frequently performed in a striped ref\u2019s jersey) and Brownsville Station put on quite a show.\u00a0 Their stage attire was a little less flamboyant than Elvis in Vegas, but they weren\u2019t in the tee-shirt and jeans category either.\u00a0 They bounced around the stage, mugged for the crowd, and basically gave me the impression that they were having a great time.\u00a0 Behind his now signature black framed round lens spectacles, there was no doubt that this was the same Mike Koda who several years before this was leaning on the fender of an Olds 88 parked outside of my house.\u00a0 His bass player at that time, Kim French, had an annoying habit of blowing up speakers and then going on a last minute hunt to borrow a speaker bottom before their next gig.\u00a0 Even before my high school band The Twig started playing paying gigs, we were fair game in the \u201chey, can I borrow your bass speaker cab for a gig tonight?\u201d sweepstakes.\u00a0 In the fraternity of musicians, it was hard to say \u2018no\u2019 to such a request.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I was impressed with Koda and his work so I thought it was neat that his band was now parked in front of my house borrowing equipment.\u00a0 Had I known he was going to be on the way up in the business soon after leaving Marquette, maybe I would have taken a picture of him.\u00a0 A true band leader, he was watching Kim and the band\u2019s rhythm guitar player lug out our bass\u00a0 player Mike Kesti\u2019s speaker cab.\u00a0 The mental image of that moment will be one of the first ones I will have to download when they start implanting on board computer chips hard wired directly into our brains.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Top Piece Video:\u00a0 Rick Derringer playing a song he wrote for Johnny Winter but is shown here performing it with Johnny’s brother Edgar!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0During my Junior High \/ Senior High years in Marquette, the frats and sororities at Northern Michigan University would have an annual spring bash called Greek Week.\u00a0 I can\u2019t say how long this went on or if it continues to this day, but I remember it mostly for the festival\u2019s finale that was held […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,7,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bands-musicians","category-local-music-news","category-woas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3826"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3826\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3829,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3826\/revisions\/3829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}